European Parliament lashes out at “shocking” U.S. surveillance program

Ahead of a U.S.-EU summit this Friday, the European Parliament had a brief debate about the PRISM surveillance scandal on Tuesday morning. With near unanimity, the speakers raised strong concerns with the program’s mass collection of Europeans’ personal data.

For those unfamiliar with the workings of the European Parliament, members of the European Parliament (MEPs) operate in transnational political groupings. Those groups’ representatives speak in order of the size of the group (largest to smallest) and I have included an indication in brackets of how many MEPs each group has, in order to indicate influence.

I apologize in advance for including at best brief quotes from those MEPs who spoke in languages other than English (the translation facility on the livestream was unavailable). The most notable of these was of course the representative of the center-right European People’s Party, the largest of the political groups, who spoke in German. The…